Monday, March 25, 2013

Crowdfunding PyDev / LiClipse status

So far, the experience on the crowdfunding has been really positive. In 10 days of funding, there are already 168 funders and 41% of the basic funding goals have been reached!

Also, it was nice to gather feedback and talk to many PyDev users out there.

Regarding PyDev, reactions were pretty positive, but regarding LiClipse, they were initially a bit mixed.

On the dark theme, it was either a love or hate reaction, but just to note, although that's one of the major points of LiClipse, it will definitely not force you to use a dark theme -- it'll be an opt in, not opt out -- and I expect that part to be the easy / fast part in the proposal :)

As for the languages support, initially it was a bit more neutral (with some ups and downs), and I think initially I did a bad job on explaining why I think that was needed, so, I've updated http://igg.me/at/liclipse to explain the 'why' part too :)

Note that as a result of talking to PyDev users, I did change the funding a bit too: there's now a special perk (named PyDev Knight) which empowers users who enjoy PyDev and only really care about a better Python support and not a dark theme or other languages (even if related to Python, such as Django Templates, Mako, etc).

So, I can only thank everyone so far for contributing and spreading the word on the funding!

Having become a recent dark theme convert, the (currently) poor support in Eclipse bugs me a lot -- so much I decided to take that into my hands!

Thankfully, many dark theme users are also backing it up :)

p.s.: but as I said in the post, the ones that don't really want that will definitely be able to use it without going to the dark theme (and I'll make sure going back and forth to the dark theme is easy and straightforward).

I would be absolutely ecstatic to see PyDev gain the ability to properly highlight Mako syntax, since there doesn't appear to be *any* solution in Eclipse. I've already contributed as an Altruist, but if Mako support is officially added, I'd be willing to pump my contribution up further.

Hey Fabio, could you clarify the goal #1, please: it states "more theming and usability improvements", which will be open sourced. Does that mean only these additional improvements will be open sourced or the entire code? I think the UI improvements could benefit Eclipse as a whole and be further build upon by others if open sourced. So, does this goal - or any other - means releasing all code under EPL or is the core gonna stay closed? Thanks!

The goal #1 means that all the code related to theming plus the usability enhancements done will all be open source, so, that includes the core code related to that (only the code related to the editor support for other languages will remain proprietary at that point).

I tried to find your contact address but failed, so here goes. I'm promoting this initiative left and right since I love the idea of a programmer being able to support himself from donations. The fact that you would only make it open source if double of the goal is reached makes me sad however.

Anyway, probably a good promotional venue would be to appear on the FLOSS Weekly podcast: http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly - since PyDev is open source you could talk about that and maybe mention the founding. I'm not sure that you can get on the show before the funding ends, but you might have a chance, see the their schedule here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pYAJMbVobYCTro_z4LGo3ZQ

If you want to get on the show, please email directly the show host Randal Swartz (merlyn [at] stonehenge [dot] com).

Good luck with the crowfounding and I'll be spreading the message to the python communities I know about.